Last night Scott Wolter turned his blog over to lunatic historian Alan Butler—the adjective referring accurately to his belief that our moon was made by time travelers who also founded the Freemasons. Butler uses the space to promote his 2006 book on the history of sheep, one which situates most of the credit for the creation of the modern world on British sheepherding. The blog post is rather dull and doesn’t make too many wild claims. Instead, Butler intimates that the Knights Templar used the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei) symbol to represent their sheep holdings. The Templars did in fact have many sheep across Europe and held licenses to export wool, a major cash source for the order.

Other knightly orders did similar things: The Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece, while officially representing Jason’s fleece from Greek mythology (later changed the Biblical fleece of Gideon), actually took the form of the hoisted sheep used by Burgundy’s wool merchants. As Butler himself knows, the idea of sacred sheep and rams goes back to the origins of animal husbandry. However, there isn’t any evidence that the Knights intended to symbolize their sheep with the lamb, which comes from John 1:29 and typically symbolizes Christ’s sacrifice. Nor is the Agnus Dei unique to the Templars; medieval people used it all the time, and the Knights Hospitaller also used the same lamb, following an old Catholic tradition from the ninth century onward in which wax discs stamped with the lamb were used as protective amulets. In short, there isn’t anything unique or conspiratorial about the Templars’ sheep symbol, nor can we support Butler’s assertion that the Templars’ sheepherding brought about the Renaissance as part of an economic plan developed in the eleventh century by the counts of Champagne. Sheepherding was a standard part of a manorial economy across Europe. For example, in thirteenth century Spain, sheepherding was the most important sector of the interior peninsular economy, more so than even cattle ranching. Sheep weren’t exclusive to the Templars, nor were the Templars particularly dominant in the wool industry. But Butler’s post was practically scholarly compared to comments Ancient Aliens pundit Jason Martell made at the ancient astronaut panel at the Conscious Life Expo last week. As reported by The Emoluments of Mars blog, Martell told an adoring crowd that the sun is part of a binary star system and that the absence of its dark twin correlates with spiritual dark ages, including the early medieval period in Europe, while its presence leads to spiritual golden ages every 24,000 years. (This dark star seems to affect only Western civilization and not, say, the Maya.) Here’s an edited taste of what Martell had to say, as transcribed on Emoluments of Mars:

You guys have heard of the Dark Ages, and the Golden Age -- well, these seem to be terms connected to a larger cycle of time, that the ancients were aware of. Precession today is based on what they call some wobble on the Earth caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon, and various things. […] Most solar systems are binary. We're starting to see that they have at least two suns -- sometimes even six, an intricate dance. So it's very possible that we are a binary solar system -- that we actually have two suns. Our second sun would probably be a brown dwarf -- a dark star at this point, not giving off a lot of heat, not very easy to detect. But a lot of the evidence is pointing to the fact that if we are a binary solar system, the model to explain precession is getting disrupted. […] So there seems to be a correlation between the orbit of these two suns -- and when the suns are at their farthest point we're in the Dark Ages. When the suns are at their closest point we're in the Golden Age. Now, if you think about this for a second, this is a very large cycle of time -- a 24,000-year cycle -- and the ancients watched this by every 2,000 years we kind-of point to a new north star, a new direction.

Martell went on to tell the audience that if we could capture energy from a second sun it would give us more “electro-magnetism” which in turn will “get us going” the way the sun energizes us when we wake in the morning. Therefore, this energy will take us to “a higher consciousness.” (The energy seems to only affect diurnal creatures. Sorry, bats and owls: Your consciousness will remain blinkered.) It’s touching that Martell, the co-founder of the God Tube religious video sharing service, has such little faith in modern science that he thinks we have somehow missed the existence of a second sun in our solar system, yet somehow this same science proved conclusively that “most solar systems are binary.” Over at The Emoluments of Mars you can read more about Martell’s shoddy grasp of astronomy, but it’s worth noting that there is no evidence of universal cultural florescence and decay on a synchronized schedule, let alone according to some astrological timetable dictated by the imaginary constellation before which the sun rises on the spring equinox. When might the Golden Age have been? Why did the Dark Ages fail to affect the Maya, for example, who reached their greatest heights when Europe was at its lowest ebb? Similarly, Tang Dynasty China, coeval with early medieval Europe, is remembered as a golden age of Chinese civilization. If Martell’s ideas are true, we’d expect to see world civilizations moving in sync. Maybe Martell has a different Dark Ages in mind, perhaps something thousands of years in the past or the future. I doubt it, though. If we’re only somewhere in the middle of a cycle lasting tens of thousands of years, then our lifetimes would see no magic, no change. And who’d be interested in that message?

I'm in the wrong business. I think I'm going to start devoting a large part of my evenings to searching out a symbol that nobody has really investigated in ages and then whatever I find will be the coverup, and I'll make up the new story as my own. It goes against everything I've ever been taught but oh well.

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Uncle Ron

2/17/2015 07:08:50 am

Yeah. The Social Darwinist in me says, "Making money off of stupid people . . . why the hell not?" :)

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BP

2/18/2015 03:44:06 am

"Making money off of stupid people."<- Better known as the Creationism Museum. New business idea: Fringe History Museum. Drop it right next door to the Creationism Museum. Then wrap the whole complex in an amusement park. Roller coasters zooming past dioramas of dinosaurs coexisting with people. Fun house of horrors with the Kensington Rune Stone. It would be like printing money.

EP

2/18/2015 03:48:47 am

Von Daniken tried that. It didn't work out :)

BP

2/18/2015 04:12:08 am

Daniken failed to cross market with the religious fundies. And he made the mistake of dropping it smack in the middle of rational Europe instead of the redneck US south. If the Creationism Museum was say in Connecticut I guarantee you it would have died long ago.

EP

2/18/2015 04:31:47 am

People often have this misconception about Europe because it's relatively secular. To be secular isn't to be rational.

titus pullo

2/17/2015 05:07:45 am

A "dark" binary star would be impacting orbits of planets and have been detected hundreds of years ago using observation and celestial mechanics. And what the heck is a "dark star"? this idea has been floating around for decades, I remember some fringe groups pushing this in the mid 80s to explain extinctions.

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Matt Mc

2/17/2015 05:28:49 am

DARK STAR is a fun film made by John Carpenter :)

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StrongStyleFiction

2/17/2015 06:31:17 am

The best part of that movie is the alien which is a beach ball with feet glued to it.

EP

2/17/2015 07:41:05 am

I wonder if that's where Futurama got the idea...

Matt Mc

2/17/2015 09:30:39 am

I believe so EP, the screenwriter (Dan O'Bannon) of DARK STAR also expanded his ideas from the movie and combined them with ideas cribbed from a Mario Bava classic PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES and came up with the screenplay for ALIEN,

Yeah, but he also used the term "dark star." He doesn't realize that a brown dwarf anywhere within the solar system would be plainly visible to an infra-red telescope.

V

2/17/2015 07:46:39 pm

Astronomically speaking, a dark star is a star that does not emit light. They are similar to, but not identical to, black holes (stars that have collapsed into singularities). Alternately, a type of proto-universe star that generated heat based on matter/dark matter annihilation rather than nuclear fusion. OR, they are an alternate explanation for black holes that reconciles general relativity with quantum mechanics. Under none of these definitions is a brown dwarf a dark star; a brown dwarf is more of a stillborn star. (Surprise! The poetic term has a real astronomical meaning! Or three.)

Also, it is true that the majority of solar systems seem to be binary or larger. But saying that most solar systems have multiple stars means Sol has a celestial dance partner is rather like saying that since most of the population is married, single people don't exist. And good god, a brown dwarf would be--by DEFINITION--bigger than Jupiter! We can see frozen rocks in the Oort cloud; OF COURSE we'd be able to detect a brown dwarf! We can certainly see them HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS of light-years away!

Get this man away from astronomy before I drop Rosetta on him, comet and all.

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T

2/17/2015 05:37:48 am

Gunn has a great comment on SW's blog:

"I participated in a DNA project about ten years ago, too, and both approaches showed that I have pretty much nothing but Viking and Templar bloodlines, considering my personal DNA profile--it shows nothing but NW European extraction, so this noble/ignoble tainting is unavoidable, at least ...or at best.
Steve, my own name, Voyles, is Walsh. I have Scandinavian ancestors and English, Scottish, and French ancestors "out of Canada." I myself presently look like an aged Templar warrior, at six feet and a not-so-trim 230 lbs. What am I saying?"

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EP

2/17/2015 06:11:49 am

"I myself presently look like an aged Templar warrior, at six feet and a not-so-trim 230 lbs."

I wonder whether this extends to personal hygiene and various warts and sores Medieval medicine couldn't cure :)

It's that damned autocorrect. I type it right, but it just insists on turning lambs into cows.

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Shane Sullivan

2/17/2015 07:40:42 am

I thought perhaps "Angus Dei" was a fancy name for the Papal Bull.

*Rimshot*

tm

2/17/2015 07:48:53 am

Ewe may be right.

EP

2/17/2015 08:00:52 am

Y'all goat issues :P

tm

2/17/2015 08:21:04 am

Yes, I'm baa-ad.

Byron DeLear

2/18/2015 03:21:08 am

LOL. All the kooky quackery we're metabolizing here has made the tone rather goofy lately --- "Sorry, bats and owls: Your consciousness will remain blinkered."

"I thought perhaps "Angus Dei" was a fancy name for the Papal Bull."

HAH!

titus pullo

2/18/2015 05:02:04 am

I have that happen to me all the time when I'm on my iPad mini. The darn screen is so small I have a hard time reading it even with my reading glasses on and sometimes don't check it before I post. That's why half of my posts on your site have a sentence or two that makes no sense...or maybe I just lack logic...ha

Shane Sullivan

2/17/2015 06:28:21 am

Where does he say close proximity with the brown dwarf causes dark ages? The paragraph from Emoluments of Mars says dark ages occur when the suns are at their most distant, while golden ages occur when they're closest.

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EP

2/17/2015 06:50:21 am

That's right, Jason. Even the passage that you quote says that the two stars being close is when the Golden Ages happen, not the Dark Ages. Looks like you made a mistake.

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EP

2/17/2015 07:02:59 am

By the way, this makes it rather awkward to say that the second sun "causes" the Dark Ages.

My description was a little unclear. The brown dwarf triggers dark ages by its absence, so I've edited the above to be clearer.

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EP

2/17/2015 07:09:43 am

For what it's worth, I didn't notice it until Shane pointed it out. I think the idea of an hidden dark star is sufficiently menacing that it *should* cause bad things when it gets close! :)

Shane Sullivan

2/17/2015 07:25:57 am

Thanks for clearing that up.

Walt

2/17/2015 06:41:53 am

Sounds like he's just echoing the thoughts of Walter Cruttenden from his book, "Lost Star of Myth and Time" and the "work" that's goes on at www.binaryresearchinstitute.org

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwaBxU5Nb0U is a long, mind-numbing interview with Cruttenden that touches on the same topic.

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EP

2/17/2015 07:21:15 am

When I first read this stuff, I had the nagging feeling that it sounds familiar. (And I also misread it initially to be saying that it is the second sun being close that causes Dark Ages.) I just realized what's behind this confused state of my mind: Nemesis!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_%28hypothetical_star%29

A quick look at some of the science stuff suggests that the idea, while speculative, is nowhere near as crazy as you might suppose. Of course, the important difference between serious work and whatever it is that Martell does is time scale. The periodicity of Nemesis would be on the scale of tens of millions of years, not tens of thousands of years, as Martell suggests.

And yes, Nemesis is pretty much as ominous a name as they come.

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Clint Knapp

2/17/2015 07:45:27 am

The Brown Dwarf/Nemesis argument is also one of the many and varied Sitchinite explanations for Nibiru; which also is alleged to come around every few thousand years to either ruin our day or make us magical star people.

I couldn't tell you right offhand who I first heard the connection from, but take a listen to some random Nibiru-centric episodes of Coast to Coast AM sometime. Particularly the pre-December 2012 ones. They're absolutely laden with brown dwarf theories, as though somehow the Annunaki actually live inside a star; which is amusing since others have claimed it's a rogue planet where they live underground for lack of an atmosphere. Truly special beings, those Annunaki.

I'd wager Martell's just painting a more Cremo-esque timeline over the whole thing since it failed to appear in 2012 like AA told us it would. Or... asked us to consider it might. Whichever.

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EP

2/17/2015 07:52:09 am

Except Nemesis is (a) a star rather than a planet and (b) a legitimate scientific hypothesis rather than a product of a fringe author's ignorance and confusion :)

Walt

2/17/2015 08:21:58 am

Since History went fringe, they've covered Nemesis, Nibiru, Planet X, and even Sirius as a companion, to death. The most in-depth documentary about whether our sun is part of a binary system is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eps17capdxM

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Walt

2/17/2015 08:29:18 am

I should add that these fringe scientific theories do not include the even more fringe ideas expressed by Martell or Walter Cruttenden of a 2nd sun with a 24000 year cycle that affect the rise and fall of civilizations, the Dark and Golden Ages, and our own mental psyche.

Shane Sullivan

2/17/2015 10:15:12 am

"Of course, the important difference between serious work and whatever it is that Martell does is time scale."

Exactly the phenomenon I was referring to earlier. All of the Planet X theories have been rolled into one by the fringe, and in this Ancient Aliens era of fringedom the preferred super-planet-star-of-doom-and-joy is Nibiru.

Adherents don't even care anymore if Nemesis is defined as a star and Nibiru as a planet. AA's practically made the transition necessary by uplifting the physical aliens and planet of Sitchin's fantasies in their purest form into a metaphysical spirit-alien race that can dwell in extra dimensions.

In that light, Martell's Cremo-style retooling of the "cycle" dating makes perfect sense. He can pick and choose numbers from half a dozen different theories and throw out a happy-medium that sounds suitably ancient to satisfy the average fringe believer's sense of deep time. Going full-Cremo (millions of years) or billion-year astronomical counts could alienate the Creationist element the AA gang panders to.

Or; he just vomited out a number without really thinking about it. Also entirely possible.

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Only Me

2/17/2015 04:23:48 pm

I'm going with your second suggestion. Martell has always struck me as the parroting type. Sort of like Giorgio, minus the personality.

Shane Sullivan

2/17/2015 05:35:37 pm

"Sort of like Giorgio, minus the personality."

It really depends on whether you prefer hair that's poofy, or tiger-striped.

Clint Knapp

2/18/2015 01:28:19 am

Either way you get a grown man who wears his belief in golden Mayan airplanes on his lapel.

Phillip

2/17/2015 02:24:28 pm

Mr Martels imagination is so dull. Making up fringe alien ideas should be more ridiculous and better investigated. By that I mean he should back up the claim, which is boring, with at least a made up fact or two.
His formula is simple; space word + space word = big fringe space nonsense.
Here is an example; Earth Moon + Titan = secret galactic moon
cycle.
Thank you Jason C for providing the laughs tonite

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Joe Scales

2/18/2015 03:52:07 am

Butler's guest blog spot should have been titled "Counting Sheep", as it seems to have put everyone to sleep over there.

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Joe D.

2/18/2015 06:38:31 am

Do you think at scott already knows AU is done since he has let St Clair and Butler guest blog and he is having his blog go full Templar conspiracy. To me this change shows he is no longer concerned about what H2 thinks

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Harry

2/18/2015 11:19:16 pm

Jason Martell is part of the New Agey idea that physics has a spiritual element, like people who believe that crystals have psychic "energies" or who abuse quantum mechanics to justify their beliefs in the paranormal.

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The Other J.

2/19/2015 04:44:40 am

So if Butler is a lunatic, is Martell a solatic?

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Matt Mc

2/20/2015 08:24:45 am

I just found out the 2015 is the Chinese year of the sheep, I bet Butler is happy

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Dora

2/21/2015 07:24:21 am

It is interesting to see how some people have kind of obsession, with fringe ideas and conspiratory thinking, and this is exploited by media, such as H2, etc. Ethics are questionable, but well, trivial saying "follow the money trail" applies to AA producers, some publishers, etc. Spreading misinformation became a real commodity, can be quite profitable. So sad. Excellent blog, Jason, someone needs to analise this phenomenon of misinformation, you do it very well.

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SouthCoast

3/17/2015 04:06:40 pm

"if we could capture energy from a second sun it would give us more “electro-magnetism” which in turn will “get us going” the way the sun energizes us when we wake in the morning." And here I've been giving credit to my morning carafe of French roast.

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.